progress bars shepherd users through a series of hoops, not too dissimilar to how trainers get their poodles to win top prize at a dog show. This approach consists of identifying a set of tasks you want every new user to do, arbitrarily giving them a percentage score for each task and then bugging the shit out of users until they hit 100%. Gamification: the multi- billion-dollar industry that never happened. Progress bars are quite effective, but are still internally focused. They ensure the user does what the business wants, but not necessarily that users achieve what they want. For simple, well-defined products, there’s little difference between a user’s immediate desire and the metrics the business uses to record progress. But for anything more complex (e.g. B2B SaaS products) this can result in force-feeding configuration options to a user who simply wanted to manage some tasks, or requiring a user to invite their team before they’ve finished assessing the product. For example, many products ask users to invite additional friends who aren’t on the service before they show a user’s onboarding as complete. Does this benefit the business or their customers?
Understand the customer’s definition of success: onboarding 3.0
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